I don't know how anybody can say this with a straight face.
Even in a systems context I think it's pretty reasonable to want to either perform or receive a HTTP request, as soon as you do that in Rust you are funneled into Hyper or something built on top of it (like reqwest) and instantly are dependent on tokio/mio.
The very first example in the reqwest readme^1 has tokio attributes, async functions AND trait objects.
It's impossible that a beginner attempting to use the language to do anything related to networking won't be guided into the async nightmare before they have even come to grips with the borrow checker.
Even in a systems context I think it's pretty reasonable to want to either perform or receive a HTTP request, as soon as you do that in Rust you are funneled into Hyper or something built on top of it (like reqwest) and instantly are dependent on tokio/mio.
The very first example in the reqwest readme^1 has tokio attributes, async functions AND trait objects. It's impossible that a beginner attempting to use the language to do anything related to networking won't be guided into the async nightmare before they have even come to grips with the borrow checker.
1. https://crates.io/crates/reqwest